Classroom Innovation Is Familiar Endeavor -- New Approaches Can't Replace Good Teaching

If ever there was a time in American education when it was open season on trying something different, it was during the late 1960s.

A former Texas high-school teacher was in the White House.

And President Johnson persuaded Congress to approve the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, with a tidy $1.3 billion to encourage educational experimentation to help disadvantaged children - and by example, all children.

The rush to innovate was on.

Of all the tinkering attempted, the Head Start Program to help prepare 4-year-olds from poor neighborhoods enter kindergarten is the one educational bonus still with us.

For the history of educational innovations is that they come and they go and they come again - from junior highs to middle schools, from team teaching to contract learning, from open-concept schools to self-contained classrooms and from everyone-on-the-same-page instruction to everyone-at-their-own-speed learning.

Heeding the call to innovate, this state's largest school district broke with tradition in the mid-1960s and sought a non-homegrown superintendent from a suburb of Denver.

Forbes Bottomly startled Seattleites in 1966 by proposing perhaps the biggest innovation ever - creating education centers of about 5,000 students on one campus, serving students from preschool through community college and at the same time desegregating the city's schools.

The outcry against the plan was heard from Lake City to West Seattle. Lack of funding and parental opposition doomed the education centers plan.

But Seattle did get one legacy from it - the new South Shore Middle School, which along with Rainier Beach High School across the street and Dunlop Elementary School down the block was to have become the city's first education center.

South Shore was built as an open-concept school, essentially everyone under one roof without walls.

"Open concept" was big in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The biggest open-concept experiment hereabouts was the Lake Washington School District's Juanita High School.

Completed in 1971, Juanita proved "too open" for staff and students.

A little more than a decade later workers were sent back into the building to put up walls and dividers.

Most veteran educators will tell you that there isn't much in the way of educational innovation that hasn't been tried at one time or another.

After all, what was the one-room school but an early version of experiments today where pupils are lumped together and taught without regard to their grade in school.

True, the hardware or technology of instruction may change.

But the technology, too, can miss the mark - consider the dusty classroom television sets, mute witnesses to TV's failure to fulfill its promise as an innovative teaching tool.

While the ivory-tower types think up new ways to teach or to organize or to house students, one thing that innovators painfully learn is that you can innovate until you are blue in the face, but if teachers won't go along, you can forget it.

In the mid-1980s Seattle teachers, complaining that nobody asked them, all but scuttled a plan to continually test and monitor students on basic skills.

For how teachers, parents and students feel about innovations and their role in them has a lot to do with their success.

In 1977 this reporter traveled the United States under a Ford Foundation Fellowship for education writers.

OPPOSITES ACHIEVE

In Charlotte, N.C., I discovered that the two highest-achieving elementary schools there were the city's two most opposite schools.

One was a fundamental alternative school, where kids sat in straight rows, teachers and students met a dress code and teaching was back-to-basics.

The other school was the district's open alternative school where teachers taught in jeans and sandals, kids helped decide what they would learn and schedules were flexible.

But on standard tests these schools were neck-and-neck - right at the top.

Why? I asked. The answer was simple:

Both schools had crackerjack principals, handpicked staffs who believed passionately in their brand of teaching and super-supportive parents who also believed in each school for their children.

AN ACT OF FAITH

In the final analysis, teaching and learning are an act of faith.

Recently, I ran into a veteran teacher, now retired, who recalled listening once to an educational researcher who had tracked the history of classroom innovations.

When all was said and done, the essential ingredient was not the innovation, but the chemistry between an adult and a child - the teacher and student.

In a nutshell, good teachers teach, no matter what the surroundings, the textbooks or the technology.

-- Constantine Angelos covered education for The Times from 1965 to 1989, except for an eight-month stint as public relations officer of the Seattle School District.